The backdrop is a carnival, but it’s also a graveyard, or maybe an empty field backed with distant trees. A woman studded with fragments of glass lies spread-eagled on a great wheel. Between her legs, Carrie lies on an altar, covered in writhing snakes. Behind Carrie, Elizabeth’s blood-sheeted face hangs like a crimson moon. From the black of her wide open eyes, shadowy figures seep out and stain the other images. They hide behind and inside everything, doubling and ghosting and blurring. The card isn’t one thing, it’s everything.
“I’m sorry.” Jackson finally manages the words aloud.
Slowly, Carrie reaches for a pen lying atop of a half-finished crossword puzzle. Her hand moves, more like a spasm than anything voluntary. The nib scratches across the card’s back, slicing skin and bone and soul. She lets the card fall onto the table between them, infinitely kind and infinitely cruel. Jackson thinks the tears welling in his eyes are the only things that save him.
“It’s okay,” she says. Her voice is not quite forgiving. For a moment, Jackson has the mad notion she might fold him in her bony arms and soothe him like a child, as though he’s the one that needs, or deserves, comforting.
Instead, Carrie leans forward and opens a drawer in the coffee table, fishing out a pack of cigarettes. Something rattles and slithers against the wood as the drawer slides closed. Jackson catches a glimpse, and catches his breath. Even after forty years he imagines the beads still sticky and warm, still slicked with Elizabeth’s blood.
Carrie lights her cigarette, and watches the patterns the smoke makes in the air, in shadows on the wall. They don’t quite match.
“I’m the final girl,” she says. The softness of her voice makes Jackson jump. He doesn’t think she’s even speaking to him anymore. She might as well be alone. (She’s always been alone.)
“What?” Jackson says, even though he knows exactly what she’s talking about. His voice quavers.
“It’s fucking bullshit, you know that?” Her voice is just as soft as before if the words are harsher. “I wasn’t a helpless fantasy at the beginning; I wasn’t an empowered hero at the end. I was just me the whole time. I was just human.”
She stands, crushing her cigarette against the cupped palm of her hand without flinching. “You can stay if you want. Or you can go. I don’t really care.”
And just like that she’s gone. Jackson is alone with Carrie Linden’s blood-red walls and her battered couch, with her beads hidden in the coffee table drawer, and her autograph on a worn-soft postcard. When she walked onto the screen, Carrie Linden stopped Jackson’s heart; walking out of the room, she stops it again.
He sees Carrie Linden doubled, trebled—bony-thin hips hidden beneath a bulky sweater; the curve of her naked ass, teased by long blonde hair as she saunters across the screen; a hunted, haunted woman, glancing behind her as she darts into the drug store.
Jackson has sunk so low, he can’t go any lower. (At least that’s what he tells himself as he leaves to make it okay.)
At home, Jackson hides the postcard and Carrie Linden’s beads at the bottom of his drawer. He covers them with socks and underwear, wadded t-shirts smelling of his sweat and late night popcorn, ripe with fear and desire.
It doesn’t matter how rare the postcard is, never mind that it’s signed by Carrie Linden; he’ll never show it to anyone, or even take it out of the drawer. The beads are another matter.
Everyone knows the opening sequence of Kaleidoscope, but it’s the closing sequence plays in most people’s minds, projected against the ivory curve of their dreaming skulls, etched onto the thinness of their eyelids. It bathes the late-night stupors of lone losers curled on their couches with the blankets pulled up to their chins against the flickering dark. It haunts midnight movie screens in rooms smelling of sticky-sweet spills and stale salt. It looms large on sheets stretched between goal posts, while orgies wind down on the battered turf below.
It is the third most famous scene in cinema history. (Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)
Carrie is running. Everybody else is dead—Lance and Lucy, Elizabeth and Josh and Mary, and all the other brief phantoms who never even had names. She is covered in blood. Some of it is hers. She is naked.
Ahead of her is a screen of trees. More than once, Carrie stumbles and falls. When she does, the camera shows the soles of her feet, slick and red. But she keeps getting back up, again and again. The camera judders as it follows her. It draws close, but never quite catches up.
Carrie glances back over her shoulder, eyes staring wide at something the camera never turns to let the viewer see. (Imagination isn’t always the worst thing.) Carrie’s expression (hunted and haunted) says it all.
There is no soundtrack, no psychedelic colours. The only sound is Carrie’s feet slapping over sharp stones and broken bottles and her breath hitching in her throat. She’s running for the grass and the impossibly distant trees.
The credits roll.
The screen goes dark.
But Carrie is still there, between the frames, bleeding off the edges, flickering in the shadows. She’ll always be right there, forever, running.
to live and die in gibbontown
DEREK KÜNSKEN
Murray slips the cool steel of the silencer into my palm. My hearing, augmented with somatic genetic modifications from bats, picks up the scrape of machined metal against thickened skin. I screw the silencer onto the muzzle, using my palm to muffle the rasp.
I’m Reggie and I’m a businessman.
Murray gives me the scope. I do a quick sighting, and then slide it onto the rifle.
I’m really good at what I do.
Murray passes me a clip of ceramic 7.62 rounds. I don’t care how thick your force field is. It ain’t stoppin’ these puppies.
What I do isn’t exactly tea conversation. I kill old people. The older, richer, and droolier the better.
Me and Murray have swung high into a tree in the park overlooking the official residence of the Bonobo Embassy. Through the scope, I see my target. An ancient Bonobo female, lanky, tangled hair hanging in patches around cheeks and chin. Grey tits sagging flat and wrinkly like broken balloons. The stained, white padding around her waist doesn’t seem to be doing its job of holding in what needs holding, and flies buzz. She wheezes, staring out of the compound, searching the trees, looking for danger.
Sorry, old hag, but I’ve got you this time. I don’t care whose mother you are. I’m the angel of death and I bring—
Something loud snaps behind me. Murray, and all my equipment, knock against my back. I hold onto the branch and don’t make a sound, but dumb-ass, butterfingers Murray drops my GPS and a set of small screwdrivers. They tinkle down, hitting every goddamn branch. His furry orange face stares at me, lips forming a big O.
Alexandra the Bonobo, the ambassador’s mother, jolts from her seat and stands straight. Her diaper gives out at the same time, and plops between her feet with a hypnotically sickening splash. The old hag points at me.
“You’re a failure, you no-assed macaque afterbirth!” she shrieks. “You couldn’t kill a blind, one-armed, no-legged spider monkey! Go back to eating fruit, you mouth-breathing loser!”
That’s a bit harsh. I like fruit. She follows it with a stream of racist epithets and froths at the mouth by the time she gets to “The only thing I hate worse than macaques are gibbons!” Racist bitch. I hate Bonobos.
I’d love to yell back, but embassy security pours into the yard. They’re carrying pistols with metal rounds. Won’t get through their own force field, but I don’t want to be here when their marksmen come out, or the Gibbon police get here. My visa status is dodgy enough as it is.
“Dumb-ass!” I yell. I smack Murray. I regret it immediately. I hit him hard enough to hurt myself on the carbon-nanotube-reinforced skin under his brown fur. I did the job myself and did it pretty good. Flexible enough to keep his skin looking real, but still hard enough to be damn near bulletproof. Problem is, my sidekick is clumsy and follows instructions li
ke a Guatemalan pack burro. My hand still stings and security guys are pulling their binoculars. Alexandra the Bonobo fills the air with obscenities that would make a hooker blush.
“Murray, you dumb chimp! What kind of an operation are we running here? What happened to professionals, huh? What do I pay you for?” I stab a finger downward. “Carry the damn equipment down and pick up my tools!”
Murray scrambles down the tree with a harried look. I scamper down the other side where Embassy security won’t get a good look at me. At the bottom of the tree, we’re shielded from view. Murray is fumbling my screwdrivers out of the grass of the park like he’s preening the lawn. Sirens whine in the distance.
“All right! All right! Come on! Forget the screwdrivers! Get in the car!”
We high tail it (no pun intended) to my Renault 4L, the finest car produced in its price range in France, Colombia, and Slovenia in the early seventies. As far as I know, there are no other cars in this price range. I won it in a drunken contest of strength from a big, ham-handed gorilla who got deported a few weeks ago.
Those two events are entirely unrelated, by the way.
He was pissed when he found out about my myofibril-augments, but like they say, you shouldn’t hustle people strange to you.
The little red box of a car leans heavily to the passenger side as Murray gets in. I’m too light to balance it when I get behind the wheel. I’d love to squeal the tires to make our getaway, but I’m still learning the clutch, and it doesn’t have nearly as many horses under the hood as . . . well, anything. Still, I get it up to thirty-five. We’re on the main road and into thick traffic long before the flashing lights come into view.
“Damn it, Murray! Do you know how much money you just blew us?”
“Sorry, boss,” he says. Murray’s got a strong, slow accent from the Chimpanzee townships to the south.
“This business is all about reputation! Do you think anyone is going to hire me, hire us, if we can’t grease an old Bonobo in a diaper?”
“Sorry, boss.”
“And Murray, I can’t stress this enough. If I’d have killed her, I wouldn’t have had to have seen her diaper fall down.”
“I won’t do it again, boss.”
Last week was so much more promising. Gibbons and Bonobos are pretty stuck up about jobs having to do with death. They don’t do them. It’s beneath them. You can’t pay most Gibbons love or money to euthanize the decaying elderly. I was running out of time on my visa pretty fast and staring at deportation to macaque territory if I didn’t find a scam soon. That’s when I fell into the euthanasia business. I acquired a failing company from a low status Gibbon with a gambling problem. How hard can euthanasia be? The clients want to die, right?
That business deal got me an extension on my visa. All I had to do was turn a profit and I could do that any time I wanted, just so long as it was within ninety days. Problem was, the bigger whack shops, made up mostly of hulking gorillas, had cornered the euthanasia market. Also, I knew nothing about needles, dosages, or the sterile technique.
That’s when I got my great idea. Imagine this ad on late-night TV: “Is your time up? Die with excitement and adventure! Struggle to the very end! Hire an international assassin to finish the job that nature started! If you see it coming, you get your money back!”
It doesn’t matter that I’m not really an assassin. Most of business is image and branding, right? I’m exotic. I’m international. That’s why Gibbon Immigration wants to deport me back to my shit-hole country where military coups come more often than Christmas.
Gibbon country has great euthanasia laws. They don’t specify how it has to be done. And their weapon laws favour the rugged individualist in each of us. There are plenty of places in this town I wouldn’t walk without a high-powered rifle and a bulletproof chimpanzee. So International Hit Squad was born. I even got six column-inches on page twelve of the Gibbontown Shopper, the third-most-read free paper in the capital, right under the story about the debate on zoning changes. You can’t pay for that kind of publicity.
Clients were slower to react than the press corps. It took two weeks for the first one. Unfortunately it was Alexandra, the harpy they use to scare little Bonobo children at night. A bodyguard wheeled the saggy bitch into my office. I’d put on my best business face.
“Fucking macaque!” she said when she saw me. Then she spit on my floor. I shit you not. She spit on my floor. Who spits on a floor?
“How can I help you, ma’am?” I held a clipboard to give myself an air of efficiency.
“Your operation is bullshit!” she yelled. She yelled everything. Her bodyguard, a biggish Bonobo with a heavy pistol on his hip, rolled his eyes.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” I asked.
“I read your ad,” she said. “This is a big scam! You can’t deliver shit in a pot, much less give me an exciting death!”
“You’ll never know when I strike, ma’am. You’ll never see me coming.” I smiled my confidence-inspiring, businessman smile.
The bitch spit on my floor again.
“I was a sergeant in the Bonobo Marines!” she said. “I worked close protection for the Bonobo Secret Service and kept a senator alive during the Gibbon invasion. No one can sneak up on me, least of all a goddamn poseur of a macaque!”
I shrugged. “My guarantee is there, ma’am. If you see me coming, you get your money back.”
“It’s a scam.”
“Try me out,” I said. “Unless you’re yellow.”
She slapped her wrinkly hand on the armrest of her wheelchair. She looked like she was having an aneurysm, foaming and sputtering. I didn’t want her to die. She hadn’t signed the contract yet.
“Bring it on, little man.”
My eyes narrowed and I felt my augmented muscles debating whether to choke the bitch right here. Sure, there are lots of smaller primates, and macaques aren’t very big, but everyone, and I mean everyone, knows we hate being called little. Racist bitch. Macaques just have delicate bones.
I snapped a contract onto the clipboard and shoved it at her. “You’ll never see me coming, ma’am. Whatever you think you knew way back when has been made obsolete, just like you.”
Little veins on her neck thumped under papery, dark skin. White spit collected at the points of her mouth.
She scrawled her name across the bottom of the sheet and threw it back at me.
“It’s on!” she yelled.
“Not yet!” I yelled over her.
She’d signed in the wrong spot. As a businessman, I’m a stickler for detail. I handed her a fresh contract and put an X where she had to sign. “Do it right, this time!”
Her long, old fingers flexed and released, like she wanted to slap me. Then she filled out the whole form. Then, she signed in neat little letters and handed it back to me. I looked at it.
Oh shit.
Listed next of kin was the Bonobo ambassador. Address, the ambassador’s residence. That place was crawling with security.
She cackled when she saw my expression change. “And I’ve got augments, little man,” she said, pointing at her eyes. “I can see farther than a hawk and I’ve got nothing to do all day but watch for you.” She cackled louder and signalled for her bodyguard to wheel her out.
Damn.
After being chased out of a tree on my first attempt to off the hag, I hire a Gibbon to do some surveillance work. She’s an aging street vendor with long arms and pale, thick fur. She trundles a soup cart around, and with my encouragement, sets herself up close to the Bonobo ambassador’s official residence. The Bonobos don’t go near her, but the Gibbon diplomatic police, tall, black-eyed, with white belts and holsters, take their cigarette breaks beside her cart, nursing cups of soup, and sometimes something harder. Good girl.
At the end of the third day, she tells me that one of the diplomatic cops said that the ambassador’s mother is going shopping on Saturday at the crafts market. Sweet. The crafts market has lots of cover and is crawling wit
h Gibbons and foreigners. Murray and I can blend in.
Early on Saturday, Murray, loaded with my gear, follows me in. It rained yesterday and the market stinks of wet fur and fine mud overlaying older paving stones. The stalls, framed in wood, are covered by woven tarps of so many colours that it looks like a rainbow barfed on the whole sprawling hippie-fest. The stalls creak under the worthless weight of woven grass baskets, wooden masks, carved salad spoons, and hemp blankets. Nothing here couldn’t have been made better and cheaper by a good, solid, greenhouse-gas-producing machine.
The market had congealed a long time ago around an old cathedral tower. The rest of the cathedral had burnt down or been knocked down or something, but the old tower is still there. I bribe some janitorial type and he lets us in. We wind our way up the damp, rotting stairwell and I set myself up on the fourth floor, where the absent old bell has left a space for a marksman with a rifle to cover most of the place. I leave my dumb-ass sidekick on the landing and he’s only too happy to not be involved.
Don’t get me wrong. Murray’s good at some stuff. I just haven’t found what it is yet. He’s loyal though, like a stupid dog. If he hadn’t married my sister, I would have booted his ass a long time ago.
I can see the parking lot and it doesn’t take me long before I see a dark Ford Bronco with tinted windows and diplomatic plates driving in. I watch through the scope. I recognize Alexandra’s Bonobo bodyguard by the balding head and the long vertical wrinkles around his lips. He and the driver help the witch out and put her into the wheelchair. She looks positively delighted today. Although, to be honest, the Bonobo bitch could have gas for all I can figure out of their expressions sometimes. Still, there’s something.
Good day to die, you old hag.
I have a clear shot at any of a dozen positions once she’s in the market. I aim my scope down the rows of stalls, looking for where the most surprising shot could happen. Should I shoot her in the head as she’s looking at something, or in the chest as she’s paying? I want her to know it was me. She paid for surprise. Still, a paycheque is pretty important. This one will put me in the clear for a while, and will sort out my immigration problems.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 40